Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Which, incidentally, is the exact amount of our water bill this month. Yes, I said month and not year. When I opened the bill, my jaw dropped to the floor the way Sebastian the Crab's does when he sees The Little Mermaid singing to the human Eric while perched atop that rock. (Does anyone else think Eric was hot for a cartoon character? How did they do that?!)

Of course I thought it was a mistake and that I'd get it all worked out with a nice person from the water company's customer service department. That didn't happen. "Most likely you have a leak." The bored, unfriendly girl on the other end of the phone said. I could just picture her picking at her fingernails while I fretted about my bill.

"Yeah, right." I snorted. "A leak that made my water bill TWELVE times it's normal amount?? I don't think so." I confidently said. "Could it be the meter reader?"

"It's a brand new reader." She snottily replied. "We'll send someone out to check for a leak."

That's when I remembered the toilet. The one that had a little problem last month. It was the toilet in The Husband's bathroom. For reasons relating to self-preservation, I don't use that bathroom, which is why the problem went unfixed for so long. It had this little problem where it wouldn't stop filling the tank because the floaty thing wouldn't engage the stoppy thing. You might call it a leak if you were a snotty water company customer service rep. I remember harassing The Husband to fix it, and eventually he did. But not before it ran off and on for a month or so.

Surely a running toilet can't cause us to use twelve times our normal amount of water, right? Well, I did the math. It takes about a minute for that toilet to fill up the two and a half gallon tank. I'm pretty sure that toilet ran for at least several days, possibly worse. We were gone for a weekend and I think it maybe ran that whole weekend. That's a lot of water.

The water guy came to check for leaks today. There were none, and our usage is back to normal, of course, because The Husband fixed the toilet about a month ago. Unfortunately, Tinytown just upgraded to the big city's water company and the Tinytonians (ha!) are paying a surcharge to pay for the water main installations. That surcharge is based on usage, so that's partially why our bill was equivalent to that nice handbag in the picture above.

Ouch. So the next time you have a toilet that won't stop filling the tank, fix it sooner than we did and you can go shopping that month to buy a cute accessory or two.

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